Beyond Good and Evil 2 is "like GTA but in space" says Michel Ancel

After the surprise cinematic trailer, Ancel sat down with Twitch to talk gameplay details.

After the long awaited cinematic reveal of Beyond Good & Evil 2 at the Ubisoft conference today, series lead Michel Ancel joined Twitch to chat about the game during the E3 livestream. Ancel didn't go into too many specifics, but the scope of the game did come up.

Beyond Good & Evil 2 is a prequel. "It's really connected to the first game," said Ancel. And it's meant to be huge.

"We did not want to reveal anything before today because we wanted to make sure that the technology would be—you know, you can dream big, but if you don't have any way to make the game of your dreams, then you can talk for hours and hours and hours and then?" Ancel said.

"So we waited for three years just working on the technology, so that now you can really travel across space, planets. But not empty planets. Or not empty, generated, whatever planets. Real planets with cities, logical connection between the cities. And even all the natural events that you could have on these kind of planets, gravity, all the moons, and all these things. We needed to make sure, before coming here today, making sure that we will deliver the game."

It sounds like a ton of literal world building has gone into BG&E2, with multiple cities across multiple planets. As for how representative the CG trailer is of the gameplay, Ancel says their technology allows for what we saw at least in concept, if not with the same cinematic direction.

"You can get out of the Chinese restaurant, jump into your spaceship, go across the atmosphere, and go into your giant spaceship, and then change the planet," Ancel said. "And all this does no loading, and you can be attacked whenever it's happening. It's like GTA but in space, in three dimensions."